


put me under

by Eya_Silvers



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of addiction, Pet Sematary!AU, Reddie, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:09:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21692017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eya_Silvers/pseuds/Eya_Silvers
Summary: A cold hand fell on his shoulder. Eddie’s voice was dull, and dead.“Richie.” it said.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 7
Kudos: 70





	put me under

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiko/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Pet Sematary AU](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/540307) by Amiko. 



**I tried to write some angsty, Pet Sematary AU Reddie, and ended up being carried away by my subconscious. It's not much of an AU anymore...**

**TRIGGER WARNINGS** : substance abuse, bad mental health, homophobia, major hints about depressive states. NSFW. If you want extreme angst with a happy ending with little to no plot, you’re in the right place.

 **NOTE** : my writing does NOT reflect my personal and political beliefs. Any “problematic” issue mentioned in this fic is obviously not the mirror of who I am and what I think as a person.

 **NOTEx2** : I’m far from being an English-speaking person, so the vocabulary and grammar might suck major ass.

 **NOTEx3 :** thank you amiko <3

* * *

“So what did you think of the ending?”

Richie hated it. Problem was: he definitely couldn’t admit that to Stuttering Bill. The guy was starting to create himself a new life, to move on from the last. That’d be real shitty to drop the bomb on him, with something like, ‘ _yeah man, sorry to say it like that, but you’re shit at endings, and I think you should quit endings altogether. No more endings. Auf wiedersehen, au revoir, adios. Just… no more_.’

Yes, Richie hated endings. They left him with a feeling of unfulfillment, and sometimes, with a depression to drown, one that sat tight around his heart. Worse: they made him feel small. They reminded him of a time in his life, where he waited in his car, and stared, stared and stared and stared at the double doors of a bar as people came in and out in an irregular beat. In that car, he had thought of the words. _Those_ words.

Richie was thirteen, chased out of the arcade as Bowers and his crew hang the word “faggot” over his head like a label.

Richie was sixteen, babbling excuses as the girl that had kissed him wore a frown on and asked whether he was a virgin or a fairy.

Richie was twenty, locking the bathroom door on the woman in his bed before he knelt by the toilet and vomited silently.

Richie, at twenty nine, hadn’t rolled down the window. He could still hear the music flowing out of the club, and the laughter of the people inside. He could still see the neons and the smoke pouring out every time the door opened. Flashes of men drinking. Men dancing. And Richie was in his car, a bottle as his wingman shotgun seat. He was contemplating whether or not to take the pills.

Yeah. Richie fucking hated endings.

“It was fine.” he said, and he imagined Bill smiling on the other line as he said so. “Better than your previous ones, and that’s saying a lot.”

He heard Bill’s smile as he talked. Mission accomplished. “Thanks, man. Whatever thing I was s...s-s-stuck on all those years… k-k-killing It managed to help me move on.”

“Yeah, I mean the bitch was a bitch, but in the end we still got out of that shit with something. Bev looks better too. I mean, the bruises are gone. Sexy Ben better continue to treat her right.”

“We g-g-grew up, in a way. We got over It and learned from it. I’m really p-p-proud of us all.”

“Aww, c’mon Bill, don’t be a sap. You’ll make this mean motherfucker cry too.”

“Totally my intention. B..b-b-but, Richie, are you doing okay?”

Richie plopped down on his desk chair, in front of his open MacBook.

“Why d’you ask?”

He heard Bill’s incredulous laugh through the phone. “Because I can. How are you, man?”

“I’m alright. Peachy. I was actually in the middle of writing down new lines for my new sketch.”

“That’s great. Listen, I was thinking of coming over one day and grab a c-c-coffee or something, if that’s cool.”

“Yeah, no, my apartment’s a fuckin’ mess, dude.”

“Well _you_ haven’t changed. You know I d-d-don’t mind it, Richie.”

“And you know I do, Bill. Besides, I’d rather meet up at your place. Really.”

“Alright, I won’t force. Just d-don’t forget to reply to messages, on the groupchat. Let’s not forget each other again.”

“Yeah.” Richie murmured in the phone. “See ya Bill.”

Richie stayed at the desk, MacBook open onto a blank page. It had been a good talk. Not many questions had been asked, and if they had, he wouldn’t have answered them anyways. He’d have just done a voice, one of the many that were not his own, to throw Bill off.

He was about to rest his hands on the keyboard, hesitantly, when he heard the door of the room open.

He didn’t look up from the blinding white of the screen as the slow, gritting footsteps approached. He tried to think of a joke, anything. He came out empty.

The steps ended directly at his side.

Silence.

A cold hand fell on his shoulder. Eddie’s voice was dull, and dead.

“Richie.” it said.

* * *

_Everything was so loud._

_The house crashed into itself, a tornado of brown and grey tearing its bricks and wood from the inside until all that was left was nothing. Ben and Mike’s hands clawed onto Richie’s shirt, on his arms. Nearby, Beverly cried. Bill just stood there. The two men continued to hold him, even when he fell to his knees. Richie didn’t feel them. He heard everything and nothing at the same time, one thought, the only one that mattered, deafening. It made his ears ring, eardrums about to pop._

_He continued to scream his name until his throat was raw._

_Then he screamed some more._

Richie, we have to go ー

_No, because Eddie wasn’t here._

Richie, the cops will be there any minute ー

_No, because Eddie. Wasn’t. Here._

_He got tired, after a while. Bev cupped his cheeks, Ben picked him up ー fucking Ben, who couldn’t leave a man behind, with his good looks and good heart and good eyes filled with tears. Save your goddamn tears, Good Ben. You get to go back to childhood because your childhood is right at your side, helping you to drag me to the quarry. Mine is six feet underground. Put me under with him._

_Richie was last to jump off the cliff. The water hit like a wall. Under the surface, it was quiet, and muddy, and green._

Eddie would’ve hated it, _someone said._

_Richie started to cry._

_They surrounded him. The losers that were left. Richie bowed under the weight of his loss, and they hugged him tight, the four that were there, holding his grief to make it a little lighter._

_“I need to go back there.” Richie said after a while. He took off his glasses, stared at the red in the broken glass._

_As expected, the protests came. They slid off his skin like water._

_“I’m gonna go back there.” he repeated. He was now calmer, sadder. “Eddie… Eddie deserves a proper burial. We can’t let his body stay with It… it’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong, man.”_

_“We know” they said, but they didn’t understand._

_“Richie, he’s buried under centuries of tunnels.” Beverly croaked._

_Richie looked up. She was a blur, without his glasses. A blur of fire, and white. He couldn’t hear her. He chose not to hear her._

_“Let’s head back to the hotel, clean, and sleep for a while. We… there’s nothing we can do, Rich.” she said, looking up to the other boys as her fingers caressed the back of Richie’s hand. “He’s gone.”_

_They agreed, nodding somberly. Someone took Richie’s hand. They helped him up. Together, they swam out of the lake and dried themselves off. When they walked through the streets of a deserted Derry, it was silently, reverentially. Everywhere they looked, their childhood flashed back at them. But when Richie stood out the shop front, he didn’t have a childhood to look back to._

_That night, Richie rose up alone, with dirt on his hands, and the taste of death in his mouth._

_The grave was big. Eddie’s body lay inside it like a child in an adult’s coffin. Legs tangled, hair unkempt. Dried blood tainting his shirt with the gaping hole in the middle._

_The sayings had been wrong. Eddie didn’t look asleep._

_He looked fucking dead._

_Richie threw the first shovelful at the same time as his body started spasming. Uncontrollable tears, maybe thirty years worth of them. Thirty years worth of fearing, of hiding, of loving, thrown down a hole to never come out of._

_To never come out of…_

“He’ll live inside us.” Bev said. She was sitting on his bed, and her arms surrounded his frame, and her head kissed his shoulder. “His memory will stay with us. And we’ll keep it this time. We’ll keep it for good.”

_Another shovelful. Eddie’s face, bloodied and bruised, was soon to be masked with dirt. That was good. Richie didn’t want to see that dead face any longer._

“I met an old woman, yesterday…” she said, slowly. He listened as he puffed out a cloud of smoke, before giving back the cig. “She wasn’t real, in the end, just another nightmare… but she did say something interesting.”

_Eddie’s face was no more. It was a pile of dirt, of grass and flowers, on top of a headless body. Eddie’s body. Richie knew it by heart, this body, for all that long and forgotten childhood spent at its side. He recognized the shapes and the curves, the dips. The thin frame and the sharp bones. Too familiar. Too dead._

“No one who dies in Derry ever really dies.” Bev murmured. “It’s a beautiful message, if you take the horrifying thought of It out. And in a way, she was right. Eddie isn’t dead as long as we remember him.”

_And today Richie remembered, and longed for forgetting._

(I did it Richie!)

_He threw the last shovelful, then flattened the battered soil with his hands. Salt ran down his neck, sweat and tears mixed._

(I think I killed It)

_The tape holding his broken glasses had torn with the effort. He took them off his nose, to run two bruised hands on one bruised face, shut those eyes._

(Richie?)

_He made a bed by his love’s grave because there was nothing left anywhere else for him. There was no one. There was nothing. There was a body on the moss, a body six feet under, all the beautiful life that would have awaited them, and that was it._

* * *

Richie ate like a post-apocalyptic survivor. Canned lasagna, canned eggs, canned peaches.

Apocalypse seemed like the best word for it.

It was probably the silence. He had turned on the radio in the bedroom and in the bathroom, on two different channels that overlapped each other and made his teeth grit with the discomfort when he stood in the hall, between the two rooms ー but the radios made noise, a good noise, a noise that was alive, and that relieved him a little. He had turned on the TV too, for the images and the colors and the people in it that were in constant movement.

Anything for movement.

* * *

_They came back to the hotel at 8:23 in the morning. If Richie had checked his watch, he would have known that it was exactly 27 hours after he’d finished burying the body._

_27 hours._

_A lifetime of waiting._

_Richie held the door open for him. He couldn’t stop smiling, much like the dead man that knew he was going to heaven. He watched as Eddie’s chest rose and fell, breaths, slow, frail, little_ alive _breaths escaping Eddie’s lips. He staggered on his legs with the threat of a fall. Richie caught him as the knees gave out. He caught him and they both sank down to the floor. There, Richie kept Eddie’s head on his shoulder, stroke the small hair at the back of his neck._

_“What the fuck did you do?” he heard from the breath in his ear._

(We can still help him, he’s just hurt -)

_“What the fuck did you do?” Eddie said with a gravelly voice._

_Richie seized Eddie’s cheeks between his hands. He was covered in dirt from head to toe, clothes and bandages stained brown and green, gravel in his hair and in the folds of his shirt and his pants. The laces on his left shoe were gone. The right shoe hung off his foot, heel tasting the air. A fingernail was missing, and the others were broken, with dirt under them. It looked like he had fought his way out from the center of the earth._

_And he did._

_Richie swallowed his saliva. It slided down his throat in a lump that nearly choked him. Finally, he was able to speak._

_“Eddie, you okay?”_

_“What the fuck did you -“_

_“Eddie!” Richie cried out, because Eddie’s eyes were vacant. They were vacant as though something was missing in them. An empty chair at a dinner table. Richie shook him, and the vacant eyes fell down on him._

_“What the fuck did you do, Richie?”_

_The lump in his throat grew bigger. It made heavy tears mass together in his eyes. It made his nose turn red and run, and his gullet itch like a monster was trying to claw out of it and show itself to the world in all its detestable nature._

_Richie wouldn’t allow it._

_“I brought you back.” he replied, pushing the lump deep inside him. “You’re okay, Eds. You’re okay, right? Hold on…” He took a hand off Eddie’s cheek, to feel the gape in the shirt, where the open wound was, and where it wasn’t now. His breath came out in a relieved sob. “I brought you back. Yeah. You saved me and I saved you, eye for an eye, we help each other out, right?” He didn’t know what the fuck he was saying at this point because his tongue had to fill and replace the feelings he couldn’t express. “You - fuck, c’mon, get up. Come in. Okay, sit down. It’s fine, I don’t give a shit about the bed, just sit down. Okay. How… how are you feeling?”_

_Eddie looked around the room with an expression of distant puzzlement. Richie didn’t blame him. He had just come back from the dead, after all._

_It would take some time to readjust._

_“How are you feeling, man?” Richie asked again, crouching down at Eddie’s knees._

_Once again, Eddie’s eyes tumbled on him, like surprised to see him there._

_“I’m…” he said, and then he closed his mouth, and blinked._

_Richie nodded._

_“Yeah, you smell worse than Rick Henley’s ass after I gifted him stink bombs in his locker in fifth grade, and that’s saying a lot. You wanna get clean before we talk?”_

_Something behind Eddie’s eyes lit up. Richie’s heart raced with hope._

_“I don’t feel clean.”_

_“It’s what I’m saying, Ed. C’mon, let me help you up…”_

_“I don’t feel clean.”_

_“Eddie, calm down, there’s a hot shower waiting for you.”_

_“I don’t feel clー”_

_Then panic rushed through him like a faucet was turned on and he seized Eddie’s face between his hands. The sudden brutality of the gesture didn’t hurt Eddie, nor did it seem to startle him. His lips were still opening and closing around the loop he was stuck on._

_“I don’t feel! I don’t feel I don’t feel I don’t feel”_

_Richie dragged him under the shower and drowned the flow of words under the jet of water._

* * *

When Richie closed his eyes, dread accumulated behind his lids. It was like sand, scrubbing at the corners. At some time during the night, when he tossed and tossed to try and find sleep, the sand turned into two cold stones, like pieces of funereal pottery. They covered his eyes, and forced him to stare, to the door, out the room, to the dark that didn’t stir.

The body next to Richie was as cold as the stones on his eyes. He liked to believe that when he squeezed it hard enough, close enough to his heart, his warmth travelled through his skin to the other’s. And if he squeezed long enough... long enough for his arms to grow sore and for his hands to start shaking... Eddie squeezed back.

* * *

  
  


_Mike didn’t know. If he did, he probably would have invented a new Indian-American ritual and sent Eddie’s soul back to the Reaper. Bill didn’t know either. Neither did Ben, and Bev, and St..._

_Richie was used to secrets. He had managed to keep his own_

_(dirty little)_

_secret for thirty years from the face of the world. This new one, bigger, uglier, was familiar. He could keep it home. He could watch as it sat on the sofa, staring at the opaque black of the TV screen. He could brush his teeth along with it and laugh at both their reflections in the mirror, mouths trickling with foam. He could sleep with his arms tied around it. At times, often near midnight, Eddie turned to him in the dark and pressed his face into Richie’s chest, where it was warmer, because it was where his heart beat._

_Richie dreamed about his body sometimes. He dreamed about its weight thrown on his shoulders that night, after he died. He dreamed about a white shroud and a sign, words carved on it, a child-like writing. He dreamed about the tiniest crosses planted on a cursed soil._

_He wondered if Eddie dreamed._

* * *

They were walking in between the aisles, and Richie was squeezed in between a heavy matriarch and her three kids. On his tongue bit the memory of a mom joke. He kept it locked up behind his teeth, Eddie’s hand in his hand as he trailed him, limp and colorless.

Richie was contemplating a pack of spicy cheetos when Eddie dropped his hand. He stood in front of the mother and her hens, and said,

“Mommy.”

Richie turned around.

“Eddie?”

“She was fat, and stupid.” he said with the tone of a joke, and Richie jolted like struck. Eddie turned to him now, the smallest of smiles at the corner of his lips. Then Richie blinked, and in an instant Eddie’s face crippled into the nothing that he was since he had been back. “She died ten years ago. I cried at the funeral, and every time I thought of her after. Richie, I’m bored. I want to go home.”

Richie took his hand again. Eddie let him.

* * *

_He missed Stan’s funeral._ Patty was really nice, _Beverly wrote to him_ . The birds were singing _, Mike sent._

_Richie left the chat._

* * *

Richie woke up with the heft of an absence at his side. He pried his hand from under his pillow and almost absently rested it on the cold sheets. His fingers scratched at the material. They sluggishly tugged at it.

Eddie was gone.

Something burst inside him ー like a current of electricity shot through a body of water. He bolted upwards, too fast for his head who spinned uncontrollably. He saw black, and white, and static played out for a couple of seconds. Then he crashed into the bedside table.

His elbow hit it first as he tried to regain his balance. His other hand shot for something to hold on to, namely, the lamp. He knocked it down in a jerk, and the side of his head slammed against the corner of the table, tearing a groan from his throat. The static before his eyes stayed for a minute more along with the throbbing pain of his temple ー those didn’t matter.

Eddie was gone.

He’d knocked down his glasses in his panic. He felt around for them in the debris of the lamp. When he found them the world was less of a blur, but so much wider, and brighter, and scarier, because

Eddie was gone.

“Shit” he mumbled, throat raw and knuckles white. He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, palping his bruised temple. “Shit! Eddie!”

He yelled his name in the empty living-room with the curtains pulled closed.

He cried out his name in the empty bathroom, and the empty kitchen, in the whole empty apartment. He came out empty. Then, he grabbed his coat, and grabbed the keys. He stormed out, Eddie’s name the only thing on his lips.

He had to look crazy, in nothing but his PJs and a short coat that was too thin to shield him from the night. He ran through the streets, the image of a short man with big brown eyes

( _Cute cute cute!_ )

in his head, the only thing he could think of, the one thing that was his. He couldn’t lose it again. He wasn’t strong enough. He’d follow Eddie all the way to the grave.

Richie searched for Eddie until the sun set at the horizon of Los Angeles. There, feet bloodied and crazed eyes, he went back to the apartment and aimed for his phone with shivering hands.

“Richie?”

Richie stilled.

Eddie was in the middle of the living-room. His wide, lost eyes bore an interrogation mark. He was standing straight with a concerned frown on. When he stepped forward, Richie could see that something had changed, that something good had happened, and that it was all going to be okay.

“Eddie…” Richie moaned, and he crashed into him. He didn’t hold him for long, but surprisingly, Eddie’s hands were patting his back in a strange and raw display of comfort and

 _Emotion_.

“Eddie, where the fuck were you?”

He pulled away just to look at Eddie’s face. His skin was beige. His lips, small and pink. And those _eyes_ , eyelids fluttering like antsy and hyperactive. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, or whatnot.

Eddie was back.

“I’m here, Richie.” he said so fast. “I went out for a bit, that’s it. Last time I checked I’m not subject to Stockholm Syndrome.”

Richie choked up.

“What… Jesus fuck, Eds, the fuck happened?” And he pulled himself together, looking at his love as though it was renewed all over. “Why were you… why are you… how are you?”

“Richie, I’m _fine_.” Eddie smiled. “Pinky finger, bro. I’m super, swear to God.”

“What the fuck…”

“You don’t need to babysit me anymore, Rich, really. I’m like, hyper. Hyper good. I feel.” A pause. “Good. I feel good!”

“You’re _hyper_?” Richie said, dazed.

“Yeah, I’m… whatever. Point is: I’ve never felt better. So, can we do something productive for once because I think I’ll literally die again if I ever have to stare at that fucking TV one more time.”

Richie blinked. The relief washed out with the colors on his face.

“You remember?” he said slowly.

“Richie you’re gonna have to be specific, we forgot that each other existed for nearly thirty years.”

“Your death.” Richie said, and suddenly it was out. The secret. It was out as the sun peaked between the curtains. “The fucking clown killed you.”

Eddie snorted. Richie found himself uneasy. “Yeah, bro, how could I ever forget about the fucking giant claw piercing through my chest ー thanks for the reminder, by the way. I’m gonna catch chronic pain thanks to you. Okay, wait, are we really gonna do something today, because I wrote a few things down in my head and Iー”

“And I didn’t tell you how I got you back…” Richie said, trailing off, eyes fixated on Eddie’s constantly moving form.

Too much movement.

Eddie started pacing. “Look, bro, I don’t really care, alright? I mean it doesn’t matter, I’m here, I’m okay, and right now, I wanna have some fun with a friend, alright?”

“It does matter, dumbass! I had to dig you up to bury you back in, do you have any fucking clue of how fucking traumatizing it was ー”

“Dude I just wanna have one goddamn normal day with a positive feeling, can I please have that?”

“Eds what in the fー”

“Do not _fucking_ call me that.”

Richie stepped back. He sat on the couch’s armrest. After a few seconds, he took his glasses off, cleaned them, then put them back on.

Eddie kept pacing. His hands were twitching.

“What did you take.” Richie said.

Eddie swirled to him. “What?”

“Looks like Adderall.”

Eddie’s face crumpled. The twitching stopped, for the matter of a few seconds. It came back as Eddie started pacing again.

“Why in the fuck would I take Adderall, idiot? I’m asthmatic not hyperactive.”

“Eddie.”

Richie’s tone was firm, and definite. When he looked up, Eddie was avoiding his eyes, and he knew he had his answer.

“Eddie, you’re completely stoned.”

Eddie opened his mouth, let out a wheeze, closed it, and shook his head.

“Don’t speak out of your ass, dickhead.”

“Well it’s either that or you snorted some black market shit and you’d rather bathe in grey water than get dope off the streets. I can tell when you’re lying to me.” Two brown eyes drifted away from the floor to Richie’s face, where the color had left, and all that was left was sadness. “Eddie, you can’t… you can’t do this. You can’t get high like that. It was fun when we were thirteen and complete morons, but…”

“Shut the fuck up Richie.” Eddie said, and his words tasted sour, and his words weren’t Eddie. “You’re not my mom.”

In another lifetime, in one where Eddie hadn’t died and Richie wasn’t wishing he was dead, Richie would have smacked him. Over the head, with his lunch box, his notebook or even his open palm if they’d been playing outside in the Barrens.

In this lifetime, Richie just stared at Eddie and the most emotion he’d seen on him in weeks, and decided that he hated what they had become.

* * *

_Eddie didn’t dream. Death wasn’t a tunnel, with the moving light at the end of the infinite corridor. It wasn’t flashes of the best and worst moments of your life repeating on a loop like they show it in the movies, and it certainly wasn’t the Reaper, reaching out to welcome you to your first steps in Purgatory. Death wasn’t painful, or violent, or loud._

_It was silence, and silence, and silence._

_And waiting._

* * *

Anti-anxieties. Antibacterials. Anti-emetics. Antrizine. Xanax. And all the vitamins. B, B6, B12, C, all the way to the motherfucking Z. His best friend Aspirin and her sister Ibuprofen. Beta-blockers. Statins.

Richie saw them all make their way through the apartment to the mirror cabinet in the bathroom. One after the other, they made themselves home. Comfortable. Cozy. They stuck themselves down Richie’s throat and stayed there, because they were horrifyingly easy to live with. As though they’d never left.

He confronted Eddie again, maybe a week later, or more, he wasn’t sure, when he saw that the dose Eddie was taking was too important, and fear accumulated into his stomach like a long lost friend. The dead man’s lips curled into a hated snarl.

“I think I know better than you what I’m doing, bitch.”

“Then where’s your PhD, doctor? Didn’t take you for a fucking specialist in” and Richie squinted down at the white-capped bottle in his hand, “what the fuck is this, Escitalopram?”

“Give that back! Don’t touch my things.”

Richie let the bottle be taken from him. Then he laughed. It was a laugh with sharp edges, the kind that made the little hair behind the neck prick up with the craziness it evoked.

“You wanna get high, Eddie Spaghetti? You wanna fly so high your head makes out with the clouds and it makes bubbles, out in the sky, it bloats and it explodes? _Blah_ , blood everywhere. You stay right there. Watch this.”

* * *

“It’s your fault.” Eddie said, as Eddie was slapping his cheeks. Richie’s cheeks were wet, but he hadn’t been the one crying. “It’s your own goddamn fault, you fucking asshole.”

The floor was cold under Richie’s back. At the back of his head, pain throbbed. He winced.

He had flown high and had come down crashing. 

“Water.” he said, throat raw and cracked.

“Fuck no.” Eddie said, and Richie got hit again. He could include it in one of his bits later, because from an outsider’s viewpoint, the scene could pass as funny. It wasn’t funny. It was just very sad. “You deserve this, you know that? Yeah. I fucking hate you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

“You still high?”

“Yeah. I got an hour left of life before I’m gone, so you know I mean this and I speak it from the heart when I say it.

“You shouldn’t have brought me back.”

Sitting back against the lower drawers of the kitchen, Eddie scrambled his legs to his chest, chest filling in and out. He was crying. Richie just stared at the ceiling.

“You got only yourself to blame.” Eddie said, as fast as it was possible, because he was high and because he was sad and because he was, for now. “You dumped my dead body into that cursed cemetery and you got me back, and you got me back fucked, and you decide to get fucked too, because, because what? What I say goes? You’d kill yourself for me too? That’s not fair. That’s not fair, Richie. Don’t fuck us both.

“Please don’t fuck us both, Rich…”

Richie nodded.

* * *

The first thing they did, with a low, sinking stomach, was gather all the medicine they could find in the apartment and wash them down the toilet. They threw the drugs too.

Then Eddie was back to that lethargic, dead-eyed man that had become him.

When Richie went to check on him, he was sleeping in his bed. He smelled like sweat and dust. Without taking off his clothes, Richie lay on top of the covers. He was two sheets away, inches away from his love’s skin. He was sorry.

He was being selfish, and stubborn. He knew it. But that was how he was, and he wasn’t willing to change it, not when he’d managed to bend the rules of the universe and bring the fucking _dead_ back. Eddie had died. Eddie had died, and now he was asleep in his bed, and Richie was so thankful he was breathing that he didn’t give a shit how sad it could get, how terrible, how _ugly_ , as long as he was there.

Long after Richie started drifting in and out, sometimes waking to find the light had moved farther away from them… Eddie turned toward him with a puffy, red face.

He pressed his nose into Richie’s chest, sniffling in the shirt.

* * *

_Somewhere around week two. Or week six._

_No matter how hard he thought of it, he couldn’t get up from the bed._

  
  


* * *

They needed food again. It was boring, going out, meeting the same people, mothers and children, single fathers. They were all black and white. Richie dragged Eddie along to buy food, because he was afraid to leave him alone. This time, they took the car. Richie drove. Eddie watched the buildings and the people as they blurred past them.

“I need to get wasted.” Eddie said, and Richie tore his eyes from the road for a second, because Eddie didn’t speak a lot when he was sober. “I want to feel really wasted.”

Richie smiled. He was thirteen, and stupid, for a minute. “Now that’s finally a good idea, Eds.”

Eddie slowly turned to him, those big brown, dead eyes taking their time to get lit with annoyance. But no malice. Just a bit of life.

“Get fucked, Richie.”

Richie laughed. He slapped his thigh as he choked. “Buy me that drink first.”

  
  


* * *

They got wasted. Richie understood why. He didn’t know jack about self-control. Granted, he had stopped after the fourth shot and the second glass of whiskey. Eddie hadn’t.

It had been a mistake.

The mistake was now laying at his side. It used his shoulder as a resting pillow, body twisted in an uncomfortable position. Eddie couldn’t care, he was asleep.

Richie woke up delirious, eyes filled with fog that was grey. His stomach was knotted in hunger, and his pants were tight. The buzz from the alcohol had gone down. It had travelled through his chest to his stomach, and now it resided, growling and beating, in his lower belly. He tried not to think of it, of how long it’d been. Of how lonely he’d been.

“You think I’ll get better?” Eddie said as though he hadn’t closed his eyes once that night, or even the others.

( _Eddie didn’t dream._ )

“Do you think you’ll get better?” Richie replied.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.”

Eddie shifted to look at the same spot Richie had been staring at ー the burnt piece of wallpaper that had been torn by time, and neglect. It was of a dark yellow now, standing out like a pimple. Ugly.

“Is it wrong.” Eddie started, calm and anesthetized. “Is it wrong if I don’t care no one else knows. That I’m not dead.”

Richie didn’t know what to say.

“I know I’m supposed to care about Bill. He was my best friend, as kids. And Bev, she was always nice and calm with me. And Stan, the way he died... that’s fucking horrible, Richie. I know it is ー I wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone. I just don’t... care.”

“What do you care about?” Richie asked quietly, a little scared, holding Eddie’s cold hand in his hand.

“You.” he said. “That’s it. It’s just you.”

* * *

They watched the coffee brew the next morning, and watched the waffles toast. They watched the eggs cook and they watched the smoke of the burning, stick on the windows, until Richie opened them to let the condensation out. He watched Eddie, but Eddie’s eyes stared at the toaster and couldn’t see anything. So Richie gently moved him to the side to take the frying pan from the stove. He laid the cooked, burnt eggs on two plates.

“Eds.” he called, softly. “Wanna take a seat?”

But Eddie just stood there, sober and numb.

“Hey, Eddie.”

Richie pinched his cheek. Eddie woke up with a start.

“Richie.” he said.

“My fans call me Trashmouth.” Richie said, with the attempt of a joke. “You can call me later.” 

A suggestive wink. Falling through.

“I’m tired.”

“I know you are, Eds. C’mon. Let’s eat.”

Eddie shook his head.

“I don’t wanna eat.”

“You’re a big bitch baby, you know that?”

“Shut up.”

And then Eddie looked at him, _really_ looked at him. Richie couldn’t say what he saw in those

( _empty seat at a dinner table)_

eyes. Maybe desperation. A hint of terror. Mostly, it was just a need, a pull to the guts, or chains tied around a heart, uncoiling. Then Eddie rose all the way to his face, on his toes, hands shooting up, to caress the hot skin of the cheeks and the chin... and kissed his lips.

Richie didn’t move as Eddie pulled away. He didn’t move either when Eddie kissed him again, this time pressing forward with more intensity, with enough strength and enough want to force Richie against the table. His thighs and the bottom of his ass hit the corner. He grunted.

Wet tongues, clinking teeth, hot breath. Until Richie turned his head away.

“Eddie.” he said. He was shaking, because he’d dreamt of loving Eddie and Eddie loving him since he could remember. “Not like this.”

It was probably wrong. Allowing Eddie to love him, after everything he’d done. Maybe you weren’t supposed to bring your love back. Maybe you were supposed to bury them, deep inside your soul, until your soul itself was buried under walls of old age and rot. Maybe secrets weren’t meant to be shared, especially not the ugly, dirty little ones.

“Maybe… maybe we shouldn’t.” he said, voice a waver. “You’re not yourself.”

“It’s okay.” Eddie said, and so the tables were reversed, and so Richie was the one that was afraid. “I’m only myself when I’m with you.”

And so Eddie pressed back against him in demand for more. What else could Richie do but abide.

“Kiss me.” Eddie pressed urgently. “C’mon, Richie. Kiss me.”

There was no joke to tell. Richie’s hand caressed Eddie’s, the one that was on his cheek. “You sure?” he asked, because fear turned him grey and runaway.

“Godda…” and Eddie just sprung on him, harder than ever. “Kiss me,” and Richie did. “Kiss me like you mean it.”

 _Kiss me_ he grunted into Richie’s mouth, into his breath and into his tongue and into his throat, where he vibrated low. _Kiss me kiss me kiss me_ he grunted in a mantra, as Richie wrapped his arms around all of him. Shielded him, armored him. Protected him and kept him so close, so tight on him, that he was sure a bone would break. Eddie jumped, again ーat the pressure, uncomfortable and desired, his entire body breaking with shivers. 

_“_ Kiss me!” he cried between two jolts. Then he jumped again, this time deliberately, pulling Richie with fists locked around his shirt — then he pushed him again, against the fridge, with enough strength to make the magnets drop.

Richie heard him groan as their groins touched. He groaned with him. Hands messy, clothes disarray. They didn’t come up for air often. They suffocated. Eddie palmed him through his jeans. Richie was already hard. Eddie reached for his belt, and pulled his pants loose, kissing him with the same intensity, with the same need, with the same violence as before.

Richie didn’t say stop.

They both wanted it. Eddie dragged Richie to their bedroom. They fell into the sheets, wordless and painful. Richie worked him open, and Eddie kept kissing him, even when he added the second, then the third finger. Richie pulled himself from his boxers. He was red and leaking. Eddie was red as well, all curled toes and pinched cheeks. He widened his legs, whispering circles into Richie’s ear, as he drew Richie under with him.

( _Kiss me. C’mon kiss me Rich. Richie. Kiss me. Fuck me. Please Richie, fill me.)_

When he entered him, Richie cried. Eddie wiped away the cutting tears. He dropped his name with every kiss.

  
  


* * *

They fucked until it hurt.

Then they fucked some more.

Later on, as the light turned to orange between the closed curtains, Eddie’s arms were curled around Richie’s middle, and he was nuzzled into the warm skin of his back.

“How do you feel?” Richie asked, breaking the quiet.

Eddie breathed into him.

“Alive.”

* * *

  
  


Eddie was better. They didn’t know why, and Richie said that it was probably thanks to his magical dick, and Eddie replied that the only magical thing here was the silence when he was shutting the fuck up. Now Richie knew that wasn’t true, because the silence in this apartment was a killer and had almost got to them both. In order to fight it, they filled the air with cooking smells, opened curtains and movie nights. They were doing movie nights now. Eddie had asked, after a short while, ‘ _what in the fresh fuck is this and what is it doing here_ ’ while holding a copy of Sharknado 3.

“A classic.” Richie had replied.

“Your taste is so garbage.”

They watched the garbage and Richie had Eddie’s feet on his chest, socks on and pants off, for some reason. They didn’t have sex that night. Instead they fell asleep in front of the TV, and Richie awoke as he always did around three in the morning, to Eddie’s eyes moving behind his closed eyelids.

He was dreaming.

 _It was a good day_ , Richie thought, and he went back to sleep.

  
  


* * *

Two months and seven days after the resurrection, Richie offered a night out other than grocery shopping.

“Fresh air would do us good.” he explained to an Eddie with crossed arms and crossed brows. “So would new people. What d’you say?”

“I say I don’t care about other people.” Eddie said. “You’re enough.”

“You’re sounding way too much like me, there, pal. Can’t have two socially inept middle aged men in this house, I’m pretty sure it’s counter-productive.”

“Dude–“

“Don’t ‘dude’ me, you were in my butt last night.”

“Okay, just so you know, you ‘pal’ed me first.”

“Is this a dick competition? Because I’m sure we know whose is the biggest –“

“Richie, shut your stupid hole…!”

“Says you–?”

“You’re insufferable. Fine. I’ll go with you. But don’t leave me there or I might kill someone.”

  
  


* * *

He broke off the kiss to grab his drink and down it, as fast as humanly possible, to dive for Eddie’s mouth again. It was sweet and sloppy and of a bright red, because of the alcohol and its buzz. It exhaled warmth and life, a full lifetime of it, the time of a night.

 _I never thought I’d be here_ . Richie thought, in an afterthought. _Here, of all places. My therapist, if I had one, they’d call that growth._

He was deafened by the music flowing out of the speakers of the club, and the laughter of the people surrounding them. He was blinded by the neons and the smoke pouring out every time the door opened. All around, men drinking. Men dancing. And Richie was with them, a drink in his hand and his love in the other.

(He’d stopped contemplating whether or not to take the pills.)

It was the first time in a long time they were surrounded by that many people, the alive, and the free kind, and the contrast was like color against black and white. Richie was craving it..

“If I end up catching some disease in here, it’s so on you.” Eddie promised as Richie nibbled on his jaw, frantic laughter bubbling up in his throat.

He was happy.

“God, you’re so horny.” Eddie added in a groaned chuckle.

“Aren’t you?” Richie said, and he squeezed one of his love’s ass cheek, making Eddie yelp and stare at him with fire in the eye. The kind of fire that ignited Richie too, the kind that would made him kill himself to keep it alit. “Ooh, he’s big mad.”

“You keep doing this and you’re not going to be able to stand fucking straight tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Richie?”

Eddie’s skin was smooth and silk, and breaking away from it felt like tearing off a limb. There was a flash, and for a second, they were both blind.

“Asshole—” Eddie mumbled.

“Listen here my good bitch, we’re a bit busy—” Richie groaned.

“Richie Trashmouth?”

It was a tall man in his thirtie in a plain shirt and cargo pants, about Richie’s height, and certainly not acting like a gay man in a gay club. Clearly he wasn’t here for Britney and the glitter. There was a glowing phone in his hand, aimed at Richie’s face better than a weapon.

Instinctively, Richie let go of Eddie.

“Me and my buddies saw you entering the place back there and I went in to check if it was really you, duuude, it’s really you! It’s just me right now because my friends, they wouldn’t come in, I mean, they didn’t wanna get hit on by the queens, ya know? Shit, I gotta take a picture of you with me because I gotta show them that you’re there, man, in the goddamn flesh! Trashmouth’s alive, man — I mean we all thought you had OD-ed somewhere, like, crackhead style, but like, I wouldn’t have expected you to go on full homo crisis—”

“So you want a picture?” Richie asked, some strange, distant hiss in his ears. And there he was, thirteen in an arcade, thirteen and crushing, and it was wrong to be so.

Eddie’s hand clawed against his side.

“Hey.” Eddie said.

“Hell yeah, dude!” the man barked, ignoring him, bumping his fist against the comedian’s. Richie just stared, in a daze, paralyzed. “Let’s take it selfie mode, tongue out like the bitches…!” and he started coiling an arm around Richie’s shoulders, rising the phone high up, camera front. The flash was on. Richie closed his eyes with the burn and the confusion.

“Hey!” Eddie shouted, and his hand shot to push the man away from Richie. “Personal space mean anything to you, dickhead?!”

“The fuck you calling me, faggー”

Eddie’s fist collided with the nose in an ugly and satisfying sound of cartilage breaking. Shouts arose, and Richie was among them. He wrapped his long arms around Eddie’s middle as Eddie kicked at the man, mouth foaming with insults.

“You’re so fucking dead you piece of shit!” he screamed, fighting in Richie’s arms. “Next time I see you I’m so gonna kill you, you hear me?! Fuckwad! Dipshit!!”

Quickly, the crowd began to swarm around them. Some people threw the paparazzi out; Richie didn’t see it, he just heard the angry clamor, red and roaring. Richie took Eddie out too, like a bodyguard, no, like a knight with his shield, and he was feeling like a princess, laughter exploding in his chest.

“That’s my fucking boyfriend, you guys!” he shouted to the people, and to the club and to the sky, once they were out. There was a thunder of applause that he heard, bigger, prouder, more real than the applause concluding his shows.

It felt good saying it. It felt good coming out.

  
  


* * *

The same night, they were fucking above the sheets, and it was Eddie’s time to carry him, stomach against Richie’s back, a hand in his hair and a hand around Richie’s cock.

“So I’m your fucking boyfriend?” between two breaths, and Richie buried his face into the pillow, loving the weight above him.

“Yeah, you’re my” an exhale, and a chuckle, free, as he turned his head to watch Eddie buried into him, “my _fucking_ boyfriend.”

Eddie thrust him back into the pillow, tearing him apart, brutally. He pinned his bicep with his hand. Richie loved being manhandled. Especially by Eddie. Only by Eddie.

“I would’ve killed him, I think.” Eddie said, and he didn’t stop pushing inside him, each time making him shake, and his voice, drowning inside Richie’s ears, settling somewhere deeper. “I could’ve… killed him for you.”

He pumped Richie’s dick. He bottomed out inside him. Richie whimpered. It was a slow, long cry, filled with tears, because Richie always cried when he was being taken by Eddie like that, like he was his, forever until they died again (and he’d find him even in the after life).

Eddie spread biting kisses across his back when Richie came, in stutters. Then he came too, while Richie closed his eyes, the world blurry and hot and beautiful, curled up behind his back.

After that, after Eddie cleaned him up and their two hearts took a slower pace, Eddie lay against his arm. He tangled their legs.

“I think we’re tied, man.” he said, softly, as Richie caressed the back of his hand that was on his naked stomach. “Like we’re tied together, tethered, something. I think you’re mine.”

“Yeah.” Richie said, simply. “I’ve been yours for quite a while, Eds, and we’re just now noticing.”

“No, youー” Eddie shook his head. “You don’t get it.”

“What?”

“If you’re good, I’m good, and when you’re not, I’m worse. Don’t… ask me how I can say that because no science and no bullshit placebo will ever be able to prove it to me, but… we’re tied, Rich.”

Richie nodded. “You know you gotta divorce your wife before proposing to me, right?”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. It’s fine.” Richie said. “I love you too.”

Eddie snuggled closer.

* * *

  
  


The papers were published the next day, and Richie only realized the day after, when someone slipped a few in his mailbox. The photo, flash on and lights red, sat, horribly proud, right in the middle of the covers.

The evening, he dropped on his knees and took Eddie into his mouth. He swallowed after he came, but refused to let Eddie blow him in return, which was unusual for them.

“What happened?” Eddie asked, as Richie was staring out the open window, a cigarette in his mouth to erase the taste of sex.

It was a bad day.

* * *

  
  


The phone kept ringing. Richie thought about not picking up.

_(D-don’t forget to reply to messages, on the groupchat. Let’s not forget each other again.)_

He’d left it and forgot it.

It was Beverly.

“Heya, Bev.” he said, shredding normalcy onto his voice, at least for composure.

“Richie.” she said. She sounded frightened. This made him close on himself some more, the smile in his voice a barrier for his faults.

“How’s it going?”

“I read the tabloids.”

Richie sat down behind his desk.

“You read tabloids, Marsh? And here I thought you were the boy of the group…”

“Richie, I _know_.”

And so she did.

She’d seen the photos. She’d put together the clues, like a good girl, good detective, and fuck, she knew about him, them, about Eddie, about what he’d done to bring him back, and the price it had cost.

And then she said, in a slow, small voice:

“Can I speak to him?”

Throat tight, Richie said okay.

He went to Eddie. He handed him the phone. He turned back to his home office, sat back behind the desk, and waited.

Eddie found him an hour later. His bandaged hand gave him the phone, and his big eyes gave him a clumsy smile, one that neither said you’re forgiven, nor you’re to blame.

Richie raised the phone to his ear. Rendered to silence, he was trembling. What if he’d lost Beverly? What if he’d lost her, over his secret?

( _I love men. I love their eyes, wide and bright, and their hands, small and in a hurry. I love their body, a high-speed train, constant movement, ready to crash. I love their clothes, the way they walk, the way they talk. I could listen to them talk for hours, Bev. I could suck on their words all night. They’re so much smaller than I am, and they look frail, Bev, they look like they could break me in half and I would still protect them, because they have… because there’s this life that I want to have with_ **him** _.)_

But Beverly’s words were soft. Whatever Eddie had said to her, had made her smooth as skin, and so much easier to cry to.

“Remember… that summer. We exchanged cigarettes on the bench behind sports hall, and you wheezed like an exhaust pipe after inhaling… every… single… time. That’s when we talked. Just you and I. We talked about… nothing. Or maybe everything thirteen year olds can talk about.” A smile in her voice. Richie’s face was down, hand before his eyes, to hide the tears welling up. “Crushes. I told you how for me it was always love at first sight. The boys, they looked at me, and I looked at them, and we made out for two hours in the alley behind the Aladdin, and we never saw each other again. I fell for them during those two hours, I fell for them deep… but love, real love… it never took roots. You, though… You always were the faithful type. You had your own way of showing, it was all in the details, really adorable to observe… You knew I knew. And you knew I would never spread the word. Because I was the… the _slut_ , and you were the flamer. We were goddamn flammable, and we were” and Beverly laughed, a true, rising, bell of a laugh into the receiver, that spread warmth into Richie’s constricted chest, “we were smoking like chimneys on the bench behind fucking sports hall!”

A beat. Her laugh faded away. Didn’t die.

“Honey, you have this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and… I don’t even know how you did it, I’m not sure I wanna know. But I believe we’ve had enough nightmares. So you take care of him. You treat him good, Richie.”

 _I’ve been wrong this whole time_ , he realized. _About her. Fuck, about me._ _Fucking moron. Stupid-headed ass face, you just couldn’t have a normal healthy brain._ Now it certainly didn’t seem so bad to love Eddie, not the way he did, if Beverly said so. And Richie had always believed Beverly.

Richie wiped the tears away with two fingers. A hand rose to his face, slipped into his hand. Eddie had stayed.

“Yeah.” he replied to her, swallowing the last tears. “You’re not…” and he stopped, wincing, because he felt stupid. He felt like a kid caught red-hand in the cookie jar. “You’re not mad, though?”

“I’m mad you didn’t tell me earlier.” she replied, and he nodded again, Eddie’s hand squeezing his. “You think you’re in this alone, but you’re not, sweetie. We would’ve been at your side the instant you’d have told us, and we’d have helped you through it, you know. We’d all have been with you. We still are. We love you, Richie.”

“Okay.” he said simply, because he was overwhelmed, and he felt awful, and he felt like bursting, overflowing with the love he still had to understand was his. “Okay. Quick question. What do we tell the other Losers? ‘Hey, it’s Richie, just calling to tell you I resurrected my best friend and now we’re sucking each other’s dick, good day’?”

Like insulted, Eddie made a high-pitched noise that sounded like a cat being strangled. Richie snorted on that. It had color.

“Richie, that shit’s supposed to stay private” Eddie said, “and, for the record, you suck mine way more often than I suck yours, asshole, so this hardly counts as a fifty fifty scenario.”

“Boys, I… didn’t need to know that.” Bev said, sounding both mortified and beaming.

“You sure?” Richie asked with the tone of a trickster anyone would gladly bully. “I have so many hot anecdotes about this weird, thin, tight body Eddie’s got — yeah, beep beep, I’m shutting the fuck up. So, any brilliant idea for the Losers?”

“Well” Bev said thoughtfully, “what’s certain is that you need to tell them. I haven’t said anything to Ben yet, because I don’t feel like it’s up to me. Maybe… don’t announce it over a call… schedule a dinner? A bar crawl. Don’t stress too much over it, you’ll have enough to stress about when you’ll tell Mike and Bill.”

“Jesus fuck, now I’m relieved, Marsh.”

“I’m just saying, I trust you, but they might not have the same opinion. Be careful.”

“Yeah. Shit. Shit.”

“And be okay.”

“Fuck.”

“I love you Richie. You too, Eddie.”

“Thanks, Beverly.” Eddie replied to her, and that was the end of the phone call.

  
  


* * *

So he joined the groupchat again. He apologized for leaving. The Losers said they understood. Together they set up a date and a place, and they said that it didn’t bother them to board a six-hour flight, really, Losers stick together… and Richie’s heart was filled, overflowing.

They were going to Le Corbeau et le Renard, a french restaurant in L.A., something that was so different from the Jade of the Orient, surely no dessert could come to life and attack them there. Eddie put on a nice white t-shirt and said,

“You’re stressed.”

“How’d you figure?”

“Because I’m stressed.”

“I don’t wanna do this.” Richie admitted.

“Why the fuck are we both cowards?”

“Bullshit, you killed a clown.”

“Then the clown killed me. Hilarious comeback, comedian.”

It was another bad day.

Richie knew that as he walked out of the taxi with his heart in his throat, and the guilt, heavy and oozing, sitting on his shoulder and in the way he had his hands in his pocket, and his head dropped low, ready for a blow. Eddie followed without really being here. He was faded in the background, like static on an old TV and the images were black and white, terrible quality.

In front of the restaurant, he found Beverly. She had changed. There was a golden ring around her finger. There was a smoke in her hand, that she dropped to her heel when she saw him, when she saw them; Eddie.

“Hey.” Richie said.

“Oh my god.”

He didn’t know what to do with what sat on her face. He didn’t know if it was pretty, or ugly. Maybe it was neither. Maybe things weren’t black and white at all.

She rushed past him, threw her arms around Eddie’s neck and sobbed. They stayed there for a while, for longer than it was comfortable. Eddie didn’t complain. He squeezed back, and thanked Beverly, then promised he was okay, over and over, until she scrambled off and kissed both his cheeks, warmly and sloppily.

“Let’s go.” she said then, and she was holding Eddie’s hand, looking up to him like nothing else mattered. “Tear off the band-aid.”

Richie nodded.

* * *

The reactions were as expected, and still they were not. Mike didn’t scream monster. Ben didn’t cry, but Bill did, as he took Eddie into an embrace and wet his collar with the tears. Richie wept when he watched them surround his love. Then Mike pulled him inside the circle, and he was sandwiched between him and Ben, and they were all crying, and they must have looked insane. People were going to wonder, and waiters were going to get their manager. The Losers had learned long ago to stop caring about stares. They only cared about the eyes of their inner circle.

The circle was small. Enough. Richie’s chest went light with the contact of them, of his home. He realized, with the gasp of a man waking after a nightmare, that he’s been missing this.

He unburied his feelings as the table listened and watched. He started by denying the eventuality of a choice in that story, then when Bill opened his mouth to counter he accused him, or them, all four of them the Losers that were left for leaving and forgetting again. Richie got up from his chair, pointing fingers until Ben ( _Good Ben_ ) told him that he was right, it was their fault too, and Bev made Richie sit down.

Then he said he was sorry.

Then he said he was happy.

Happier than he could remember ever being. And the Losers watched silently, and they were all looking at him, but it was different than when he was performing in front of an audience. It was being seen, and being recognized, and being accepted, through the things he did and not the things he pretended to have done.

“I’m… shameful.” he admitted, head low. “Yeah. There’s all this thorough fucking shame, I… I should have told you guys about it, before I did it. Shit, I’m so glad I did it though. Because otherwise Eddie wouldn’t be here, and I think I wouldn’t be either, and I just… forgetting him is one thing, but getting to survive in a world where I remember him and he’s not there, I think I can’t. I think I can’t. So no, I take it back. I’m not sorry I did it. I’m so fucking happy he’s here.”

“I think there’s only one thing that matters, Richie.” Bill said, and they all listened. “How are you Eddie?”

Eddie hadn’t said anything since they sat around the table. He hadn’t moved either, he had just watched, a phantom at his own trial. He was just scared. There was no need to be scared.

“It’s okay, sweetie.” Bev said. “You’re okay.”

“It’s nothing to be scared of.” Mike said. “We’re all together.”

“We’re there.” Ben said. “No matter what.”

Eddie looked up, to Bill, and Ben, and Mike and Bev, and Richie. There was an empty chair at the dinner table.

“Stan would say the same thing as us.” Bill said. His eyes shone. All their eyes did. “He’d only want you happy.”

Eddie nodded. He looked overwhelmed, and frail. But when he spoke, his words were strong. Richie was so proud.

“There was a time where I wasn’t.” Eddie said, clearly, looking at all of them with tears threatening to roll down, and he was strong, the strongest out of all of them, and Richie just thought… _I love him. I love him so goddamn much._ “I wasn’t happy, or sad, or angry, or anything. I just wasn’t. On a… a loopー

“ーyou know you guys are stressing me when you’re looking at me like that, right, I hate being stressed.” and in spite of himself, Ben snorted. “That really wasn’t funny!”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Ben said, and Richie bit down on his lip, hard, though it didn’t stop the beam on his face.

“Go on, Eddie.” Beverly said, and Eddie nodded, looking down at his hands on the table. He fidgeted with the ghost of an inhaler.

“I started….” Eddie was pulling on a cuticle. “I started taking the pills again like three decades of fucking trauma hadn’t been crushed under Neibolt House with me, no, _don’t touch me_ , I need to say this.” and Richie pulled his hand back, understanding and listening. “I think… I was taking the pills because they were making me feel again, and they weren’t fucking placebos, they actually worked on my brain!” (He chuckled nervously. No one laughed.). “They didn’t make me happy but they made me walk, and talk, and be, so I thought that was a start, finally, some goddamn new beginning, you guys know what I’m talking about, right?” (They nodded. Respectful silence.) “So, hum… basically, I… let’s just say I was a crackhead for some time, up until this dickhead in an horribly out-of-fashion hawaiian shirt decided to get promoted Crackhead Superior and snatch the glory.”

Richie hovered. “Yeah I’m not proud of that.”

“Well don’t ever be, that was a bad fucking move, dipshit.” and he looked absolutely terrified out of his goddamn mind, so Richie didn’t joke. Eddie was breathing hard at this point. But it wasn’t asthma, or a panic attack. It was just the life-saving pain that came with courage. “So yeah, I stopped taking the pills, and I also stopped altogether, and that was… it was just terrible, guys. It was… fuck. Fuck, it was just… _everywhere_ in me, spreading, this, _nothing_ , not even something, a black hole, or a cave I was stuck in, like the… the… the fucking _clown_ ’s lair, and I could see the light above and it was taunting me but I couldn’t reach it because I was too small and too weak, and I remember wondering if that was it, if that was what death was, once fucking more, this forever wait in a cave…”

He was crying.

“And then I saw Rich…

“Dude, you were such a fucking wreck, I thought you were worse than me because I couldn’t look at myself in a mirror at the time, because you were in desperate need of solid food and vitamin C, it was miserable to look at. At least you were warm, so I wasn’t gonna argue. Yeah, we, hum… I guess we… we helped each other up? Like we, got each other clean, and… lifted… each other… up? Fuck.”

“That’s just awkward now, dude.” Richie mumbled, blush creeping up his cheeks.

“No, it’s just… I don’t know how…?”

“You don’t have to, it’s fineー”

“We’re together.” Eddie said. So strong. So _good_. “Richie and I, we’re together now.” And he took Richie’s hand, renewed and bright, light-headed.

Without a sound, someone raised their drink. The six glasses made a _clink_ when they met, echoing long after in Richie’s ears like a golden promise.

Is this what it felt like? Loving, and being loved in return. Richie thought he’d never know. But now that everything was of a pretty gold, he knew that he could never let go of that feeling. In the spurt of the moment, he turned to Eddie, and kissed him in front of everyone. When they let go, he found the same knowledge in his love’s eyes.

They drank, and ate until satisfaction. The food was good. The waiters didn’t seem to mind the noise.

Ben announced that he had proposed to Beverly, who proudly raised her left hand to show the world. The table applauded, and Eddie was grinning at the couple, and Richie shouted some crude comment before he leaned forward to whisper congratulations at Beverly’s ear. You found him, the man of your life, that one-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Keep him closer, always.

  
  


* * *

_Eddie met him into the bathroom of Le corbeau et le renard. He was twitching, shifting from one foot to the other._

_“I was wrong.” he told Richie. “I care about them, I just forgot what it was like.”_

_Richie breathed in._

_“I forgot too.”_

_“I feel fucking terrible, Rich.”_

_Richie shaked his head._

_“But you feel.”_

* * *

  
  


“How did you know about the cemetery?” Mike asked him as they stood in front of the counter where they were paying.

Richie shrugged. “You’re not the only one that can do some digging. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but books,” he added, when Mike frowned, “the freaking books in your library about the Indian-American tribe you stole from, they saved Eddie’s life.”

“No, Rich.” Mike said. “You did.” He smiled. “I’m so damn happy for you two.”

He hugged him, and Richie hugged him back a bit late, surprised but grateful.

“So, how’d it go with the divorce?” Mike then added, handing his credit card to the man behind the counter. “Eddie didn’t say.”

Richie froze.

* * *

First, they got all of Eddie’s papers back. They’d been lost, with his body, crushed under Neibolt House; but in the name of the law, Eddie had never died. They pretended a stolen wallet for the bank and a stolen passport to L.A.’s passport agency. They filled out Form DS-64 together, Richie criticizing the impossible complexity of the request and Eddie snapping back that it was the way the system worked even though fucked. They agreed that the country as a whole was fucked, anyways.

Then, Richie called his manager. The man yelled at him for a good thirty minutes before Richie was able to get a word in edgeways, then it was just another thirty minutes of explaining and apologizing, for all the money lost during the cancelled tour, for the fright caused by his disappearance, for the polemic on the press and all of social media over his unofficial coming-out. They organized a meeting, though Richie didn’t think he was prepared, but it was necessary.

Lastly, Eddie contacted his wife. Richie had insisted with him doing it. He stayed with him during the time the phone call last, and he held him after, even if Eddie insisted that he was fine. That he was feeling things, just not towards her, really. He had never loved Myra, he knew that now, not in the way she wanted, and not in the way he loved Richie.

They saw a therapist. Together, then separately. It was a process in progress, because Eddie said that he couldn’t feel when he left Richie’s side, and Richie said that he would never leave Eddie in there. _Fear of abandonment_ , the therapist later wrote written on their file. _Post traumatic stress, anxiety, and unhealthy coping mechanisms._ **_But growing_** _._

The Losers were coming to dinner, every few weeks, like clockwork. Sometimes it was impromptu, and Richie replied to the ring of the bell to see Mike, and Bill, and Bev and shit he was in boxers and socks, and Eddie was yelling at him from the bathroom to get dressed. Richie couldn’t fathom that there used to be a time when he didn’t remember them, or a time when he did, and didn’t want them.

( _Let’s not forget each other again._ )

He could never.

  
  


* * *

Eddie went out for a jog one morning.

He left a kiss on Richie’s cheek and a note on his bedside, in case he would worry. Then he put on some jog wear and took the keys. He was back for 9am, to find Richie in the kitchen with scrambled eggs and two burnt waffles. Eddie loudly complained, ate it all anyway, and started talking about the other runners he had met on the way.

* * *

“So you’ll come to my show next Wednesday?”

Richie had already bought the tickets. Five of them, actually, and one more, that he’d stuck under a magnet on the fridge, for Stan. And if Bill said he couldn’t come, something that was impossible because the man would feel too guilty afterwards, well, Richie could still play the _how dare you do this I literally went through the process of thinking of you, thinking of inviting you, deciding you’re worth it and buying a ticket for you_ card.

He’d already asked Beverly and Good Ben, and Mike would move back his trip to Germany just for this. Bill _had_ to be there.

“Sure!” Big Bill said. Richie smiled, high. “Man, I c-c-can’t wait. Is it okay if I bring my wife? You’ll have the occasion to m...meet her.”

“You mean the hottie from that new movie of yours, _Cassie_?” Richie teased, hands panicking on his keyboard. He hadn’t thought of the wife. “Perfect, that’ll give my straight audience something to ogle while I talk about giving head to my boyfriend on stage.”

“Richie, you’re a fucking asshole.” Bill said. No stutter, but a chuckle. “Audra’s great, you’ll l-l-like her. She’s got some wit.”

“So you got yourself your own Molly Ringwald, William? Don’t even say it, I get it, operation shutting the fuck up starting now.”

Bill chuckled. “I can’t believe you finally learned, Trashmouth. Guess things are really m-m-moving forward. Is the material yours now?”

“Authentic. I’m gonna strip naked live and you guys are finally going to get why I kept talking about my enormous dick.”

“You’re really asking for the b-b-beeps, aren’t you?”

“I actually do kinda miss them. Fuck it, I miss inviting you guys too. Come over, after the show. Eddie went on a” and he chucked, “this freak went on a cleaning rampage the other day after finding a long lost forgotten sock under my bed, he declared war on the under of every furniture. I love that man.”

“Well then, I can’t wait to be there. Remind me of the time on the groupchat, alright?”

“Will do, Big Bill, will do.”

“Alright, I gotta sign off. I love you, man.”

“Love you too. See ya, Bill.”

Richie got up from the desk, shut his MacBook on his notes for Wednesday. It had been a good talk, and a good day. He walked out of his office into the bright light of the living room as he heard Eddie closing the front door. He smiled at his love while he shrugged off his coat, put down the attaché case and dropped off the keys into the bowl. He was still smiling when Eddie kissed him hello.

“What are you smiling at, fuckface?” Eddie said, but he was smiling too.

“Nothing. Just you, and that nice ass of yours.” Richie replied. “How was your day?”


End file.
